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Nvidia shares tumbled Thursday after Jensen Huang announced that he would step down as chief executive and leave the chipmaker’s board. The announcement removed the leader who had been central to Nvidia’s rise and intensified Wall Street’s concerns about succession.

The stock was down 10.4% in premarket trading as of 8:59 a.m. ET. That decline followed a drop of more than 20% over the previous month, adding to the pressure already bearing down on Nvidia investors.

Chief Financial Officer Colette Kress will take over as interim CEO while the company searches for a permanent leader, Nvidia said in a Thursday statement. Harvey C. Jones, the former CEO of Synopsys, will become the first chair of Nvidia’s board.

Huang’s departure followed reports involving two extramarital relationships. On Sunday, he admitted to an affair involving Alice Huang, an executive at cloud company Megaspeed who, according to The Financial Times, U.S. intelligence officials believe is a spy for China.

The New York Times reported Wednesday that Huang also had an extramarital relationship with Kimberly Powell, Nvidia’s vice president of health care. Powell reports to Huang, according to the Times.

CNBC confirmed that Nvidia’s board met Wednesday to consider whether Huang should be removed as CEO. U.S. lawmakers had also called for his resignation, increasing the pressure surrounding both Huang and the company.

Before the resignation, several Wall Street analysts told CNBC that Huang’s departure could send Nvidia shares down 20% because of his importance to the company’s success. Bernstein responded Thursday by cutting its Nvidia price target in half, from $400 to $200.

Stacy Rasgon, a senior analyst at Bernstein, addressed the leadership controversy during an appearance on CNBC’s “Squawk Box Asia” on Thursday. Rasgon said Huang’s alleged affair with a direct report made it “much tougher for the board to leave him in position.”

The leadership vacuum is especially significant because Huang helped found Nvidia in 1993 and played a pivotal role in its transformation. Under his leadership, Nvidia moved from its roots as a gaming hardware company to the center of the artificial intelligence boom.

Rasgon said it remains uncertain who could replace Huang as the company’s next visionary leader. His comments focused on the difficulty of finding an executive capable of making the decisions that would shape Nvidia over the coming decade.

“Jensen is Nvidia, right? He is the visionary.” Rasgon said Nvidia occupies its current position because Huang made crucial decisions 10 years earlier, raising questions about who is equipped to make the next decade’s decisions.

“Who is the right person now to make the decisions for the next 10 years? I don’t intuitively know who that person would be.” Rasgon’s uncertainty captured the central problem now facing Nvidia as it begins searching for permanent leadership.

Richard Reyle, chief investment officer at Questar Capital Partners, delivered an even harsher assessment of Nvidia’s position. He said the absence of a succession plan had made the stock “uninvestable,” even though he did not extend that judgment to the broader artificial intelligence trade.

Reyle said keeping Huang could have exposed the company to prolonged scrutiny, including congressional appearances and questioning. The alternative, he argued, was moving forward without the executive whose decisions helped propel Nvidia to its current position.

“They’re going to have to move on from him, and that’s just going to make the stock uninvestable.” Reyle added that the situation did not make the artificial intelligence trade uninvestable, but it did create that problem specifically for Nvidia.

Kress now assumes interim control as Nvidia confronts a sharp stock decline and searches for its next CEO. The company must also adjust to a board structure led by Jones while investors weigh the consequences of losing the leader most closely associated with Nvidia’s success.

DISCLAIMER: GoldInvestors.news is not a registered investment, legal or tax advisor or broker/dealer. All investment/financial opinions expressed by GoldInvestors.news are from the personal research and experience of the owner of the site and are intended as educational material. Although best efforts are made to ensure that all information is accurate and up to date, occasionally unintended errors and misprints may occur.